Reading for Preaching
A Month of Sundays
Updike offers a fascinating set of musings on the miracles of Christ, (p. 100) “this most tender flesh of the New Testament.” (p. 102): “There once thrived, in that pained and systematic land of Germany, a school of Biblical scholarship that sought to reduce all of the Biblical miracles to natural happenings. The Red Sea’s...
Under God: Religion and American Politics
On Jesus and Judas at the Last Supper. “Jesus seems complicitous in Judas’ sin, if not provoking it. Indeed there is an odd intimacy in the exchanges of the two men at the final supper and in the moment before Jesus’ arrest. Only these two know what is really happening. They seem to fence over...
The Divine Trinity
“The gospels report Jesus as referring to his own reputation as a gluttonous man and a winebibber, but never think it necessary to refute the charge. It would not have taken much to twist the Zaccheus episode into living it up with the exploiting classes instead of identifying with the dispossessed. Nor would many a...
Preaching Connection: Christ